We’re a band called The Venetia Fair and we have no fucking clue what we’re doing.

Our names are Benny, Mr. Chark, Mike, Joe Brown, and Chris. My name, specifically, is Benny and I feel like I’m babysitting four 12-year-olds all the time. Actually, I feel like I’m a 12-year-old babysitting four other 12-year-olds and doing a really bad job (even for a 12-year-old). Mr. Chark is like that weird 12-year-old who has a calculator watch, carries a compass (but still gets lost all the time), and loves the sound of his own voice, especially when he’s not using words. Mike’s more like a hyperactive 14-year-old who got held back and has to hang out with the younger kids but doesn’t mind because he gets to be better than them at everything and the older kids are boring,anyway. Joe Brown is the obnoxious 12-year-old who steals “chromies” off of tires in the parking lot and learns obscene words to scream so he can explain that “it actually means female dog!” to his angry teachers. And then there’s Chris, the excitable 12-year-old who can’t wait to get a sip of his dad’s beer or a peek down a girl’s shirt. Hanging out with us is probably more aggravating than anything else but I think we’re all best friends. If we actually were 12 years old, we’d be in a secret club and have an awesome fort.

We get compared to a lot of different bands that don’t sound anything like each other so it’s hard to believe anyone. We try to make music that is theatric, chaotic, catchy, and sometimes a little silly but not too silly because it’s also serious business. We have a lot of fun writing the music we write and performing the way we perform.

Not a single one of us had any substantial training in our instruments or music in general so being in a band was really hard for us sometimes but we worked really hard to make up for it. It takes a lot of work to pretend to be good at something. Then Mike joined up with us and he knows how to play stuff but we still talk to him like we’re idiots (we’re idiots) so we’re still working pretty hard (not smart). We try to play together every single day and some of that playing involves music.

We tour a lot (but never enough) and consider the van our primary home. It doesn’t have an address that you can mail stuff to (we’ve tried Van, USA. No dice.) so if you want to mail us something just wait until we get to where you are and then just hand it to us. When we play shows, all of our shit gets broken because we pretend we have infinite money to replace things and then we perform accordingly. We also pretend we’re invincible. I think Mr. Chark might actually BE invincible. After our first tour, Chark and Chris had to build all new equipment so they just made everything bigger because we like stuff big.

We crash our van all the time. Our van gets towed all the time. We don’t take care of ourselves, each other, or really anything. The only thing we care about is that after you see us play, you tell your friend(s) that you have no idea what you just watched.